At CES, Samsung announced its Exynos 5 Octa SoC featuring four ARM Cortex A7s and four ARM Cortex A15s. Unusually absent from the announcement was any mention of the Exynos 5 Octa's GPU configuration. Given that the Exynos 5 Dual featured an ARM Mali-T604 GPU, we only assumed that the 4/8-core version would do the same. Based on multiple sources, we're now fairly confident in reporting that the with the Exynos 5 Octa Samsung included a PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU running at up to 533MHz.

The PowerVR SGX 544 is a lot like the 543 used in Apple's A5/A5X, however with the addition of DirectX 10 class texturing hardware and 2x faster triangle setup. There are no changes to the unified shader ALU count. Taking into account the very aggressive max GPU frequency, peak graphics performance of the Exynos 5 Octa should be between Apple's A5X and the A6X (assuming Samsung's memory interface is just as efficient as Apple's):

Mobile SoC GPU Comparison

PowerVR SGX 543MP2

PowerVR SGX 543MP4

PowerVR SGX 544MP3

PowerVR SGX 554MP4

Used In

A5

A5X

Exynos 5 Octa

A6X

SIMD Name

USSE2

USSE2

USSE2

USSE2

# of SIMDs

8

16

12

32

MADs per SIMD

4

4

4

4

Total MADs

32

64

48

128

GFLOPS @ Shipping Frequency

16.0 GFLOPS

32.0 GFLOPS

51.1 GFLOPS

71.6 GFLOPS

It's good to see continued focus on GPU performance by the major SoC vendors, although I'd like to see a device ship with something faster than Apple's highest end iPad. At the show we heard that we might see this happen in the form of an announcement in 2013, with a shipping device in 2014.